Dawn Eden, a former rock journalist turned Catholic writer/speaker, spoke at the Edith Stein Project on her conversion to Catholicism and on living out the virtue of chastity. Eden recently received her MA in theology from the Dominican House of Studies and is pursuing a doctorate in theology. She derived some of her talk from her book, THE THRILL OF THE CHASTE.
Eden grew up in the Jewish tradition and it was not until her 30’s that she discovered Catholicism. At a young age, Eden’s parents divorced and she was raised by her mother, who did not consider motherhood to be her primary duty. She reflected, “As my mother tried to find herself, I was not genuinely a part of her identity.”
Eden continued, “I felt a crisis of my own identity through knowing my parents had contracepted. The word ‘sex’ in our house was just ‘sex.’ When I realized, on a subconscious level, that they could have had more children but that they didn’t, it occurred to me that I wasn’t wanted as an individual. Instead, I was a lucky sperm and egg lottery winner.”
After she came to this realization, Eden suffered from loneliness and felt what she described as a constant need for validation from others. “What I felt instinctively is shared subconsciously by our society at large. It’s this feeling that one’s ultimate value depends on being wanted and loved by other human beings instead of seeing the value of a person as based on the fact that they are a person created in the image of God.”
Eden addressed society’s misconception of sex as a consumer item instead of as a marital act with deep meaning. Eden described this misconception as being rooted in a view of sex as an object without context, as if it has an existence of its own or as if sex could be detached from who one is as a person.
To combat her insecurity and lack of identity, Eden became a rock journalist in her 20’s. By choosing this career, she became constantly surrounded by people who were talented, important, and, at least in her opinion at the time, valuable.
Eden said, “I believed no man would marry me unless I made my body available to him.” During this tumultuous period in her life, Eden encountered the author G.K. Chesterton. Through his book, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, she was introduced to the idea that Christians were rebels instead of complacent members of society. Eden reflected, “I became haunted by the idea that discovering my identity lay in discovering my identity in Christ.”
In 2006, Eden was received into the Catholic Church. As a convert, she struggled to understand the virtue of chastity, and she became discouraged at the lack of literature relevant to her own life experiences. With the help of books like Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s THREE TO GET MARRIED, she realized that chastity is more than mere abstinence: Rather, it is about learning to love fully and appropriately.
Eden concluded that, “Chastity gives you the power to become the person you were meant to be . . . the challenge for each of us is to listen to where God is calling us at each moment in life, and that is the thrill of the chaste.”
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